Procrastinating, Kingdom Saving, and all other forms of Geekdom

SWFF: A Race To Danger Part 1

Sorry for the delay in posting this. For some reason, if you don’t pay your internet provider, they shut off your service. Who knew? Anyways, let’s get started.

I opened my eyes and the rest of my head screamed at me for it. Quickly closing them again, I tried to think about why my head would be pounding so much. My last memories were about the minutes following the race. Katellan had come up and congratulated me while everyone else seemed very angry at me. Did I get jumped by the other racers? Daring to open my eyes I took a quick peek before shutting them again. I was in my quarters on my ship. If the other racers jumped me, I’d be floating in a bacta tank right now instead of sleeping on my bed. Plus, more than just my head would be hurting.

Did I do a little too much celebrating? I suppose it’s possible, although I’m not much of a drinker. There’s no aftertaste of vomit in my mouth, so, if I did drink, it wasn’t enough to make me sick. It is, therefore, unlikely that I’m hung-over right now. Now that I’m thinking about it, this feeling seems kind of familiar. The last time I felt like this was…. AHA! I got it. Someone used a stun blaster on me.

Once again I can hear you asking through the screen, “Torr, you’re such a great person. Why would anyone want to stun you?” Well, dear readers, it was all a big misunderstanding. After a race on Imperial Center, a fellow racer took me back to her place to try out some new positions……uhhhh, new positions for riding a swoop bike. Yeah, that’s it.

Well, as we were right in the middle of a particularly awkward, yet fun, position, a man burst into the room. It turns out that it was her husband. This came as quite a shock to me as I was unaware that she was married. He pulled out his blaster on me. I tried to explain the whole “swoop bike positions” thing, but for some reason, he didn’t believe me. Maybe it’s because, during our position switching, our clothes had come off somehow.

Anyways, he pulled the trigger, but he forgot that he had the blaster set on stun. Luckily for me, she was able to get the blaster away from him before he could fix that. Since that time, it’s been my policy to always make sure the girl comes home with me and not the other way around.

Now, where was I before you so rudely interrupted me with your question? Oh, yes, I had figured out that I had been stunned. After congratulating myself on my fine detective work, I decided that I should try to figure out who stunned me and why. That information would probably prove useful in the future. Before I could begin contemplating this new quandary, the door to my quarters opened and Katellan walked in.

I sat up, which caused the rest of my body to scream at me, and looked a question at Katellan. The question, of course, being, “what the hell happened to me?” He seemed about ready to say something when he abruptly stopped. It was obvious that he had something to tell me, but didn’t know how, because he repeated the process a few more times. “Just spit it out,” I commanded. Before he could answer, I noticed that there were vibrations in the floor and I had to ask about it. “Wait a minute. Are we flying?”

“Yes.”

“Where are we?”

“We will be landing on Imperial Center in about ten minutes.”

That one kind of shocked me. In all the years Katellan had worked for me, he was my ship mechanic and pilot, he had never been able to say something that made me speechless. I looked him over again, hoping to find some clue as to what was going on.
Katellan is a Devaronian. He, like all males of his species, has red tinted skin, sharp teeth, and two horns protruding from his forehead. That means that Devaronians are humanoid, but not human. Not being human is something that the Empire frowns upon, which is why I’m so surprised that he’s taking me to my home planet of Coruscant. The only reason a non-human would be running towards the heart of the Empire is because he’s running from something he thinks is worse.

“What did you do,” I asked. Then, another thought hit me. “And if you’re in here, who’s flying the ship?”

“Envy is flying the ship. Don’t worry. I told him to call me on the comm link when we’re getting ready to land.”

Envy, or NV-273, is my droid. I knew a droid maker who was into swoop racing, so I told him I’d give him one of my heavily modified swoops if he’d make Envy for me and he did a very good job. The droid’s exterior looks just like any other protocol droid, and has some protocol droid functions, but most of its inner workings are that of an astromech. It can fix just about anything, can slice into terminals, and, as I work on the Outer Rim and never know what kind of species I might run into, it can translate over 10,000 languages (Or so it says. I’m still not convinced that there are that many languages.).

I let the droid pick out its own name when I finally got it. Envy has never told me what the 273 is for, but the NV is because he (Envy prefers to be called ‘he’ instead of ‘it’. I know that I called him ‘it’ so far, but I don’t care. If Envy says anything about it, I’ll just deactivate him.) is the pinnacle of droid creation and all other droids are envious of his perfection. The man who made him said he also gave Envy my personality, but I don’t see it, which is weird because I’m so great that I almost always see those kind of things.

Where was I before I so rudely interrupted myself? Oh yeah, trying to find out what Katellan had gotten us into. By this time my head wasn’t hurting as bad, so I was thinking clearer. Unfortunately, it also got my mind wandering so I started asking him a bunch of questions without letting him answer. “Why are we going to Imperial Center? Why have I been sleeping for the close to 30 hours it takes to get to Imperial Center? Who stunned me? What did you do to get us in this mess in the first place? Does this shirt make me look fat?”

Ok, so I didn’t ask the last one, because we all know that it’s impossible for me to look fat. He was about to answer at least one of my questions when the comm link went off, “Get your red butt up here and land this thing.”

While Katellan took his red butt up to the bridge to land the ship, I took that time to change clothes and wash up a little. By the time I finished, the ship had landed. I walked to the ramp and found Katellan waiting there for me.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on,” I asked as the ramp was lowering.

“It can wait until we’ve gotten through with the Imperial Customs agents,” he responded.

I turned to look down the ramp for said agent, but instead what I saw was a man in plain clothes pointing a blaster pistol at me. “Actually, Katellan,” the man said, “let’s just get back on board and you can tell him all about it right now.”

At this point, I probably should’ve been more concerned with my safety, but all I kept thinking was, “I wonder if the man with the blaster will let me smack Katellan around for a few minutes before he starts whatever it is he has planned for me.”